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taylorvich [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://newatlas.com/space/nasa-installs-laser-communication-system-psyche-asteroid-probe/ [newatlas.com]

When NASA's Psyche probe launches in October on its mission to a metal asteroid as much as 309 million miles (497 million km) from Earth, it will be carrying a new laser communications system that promises to revolutionize deep space missions.
...
By relying on old-fashioned X-band radio systems, crewed and robotic missions suffer from bandwidths and transmission speeds that are ridiculously small and slow. A single high resolution image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can take an hour and a half to send and the data from the New Horizons spacecraft's flyby of Pluto took 16 days to download.

In light of this, NASA has been experimenting with using lasers as a way to not only create much faster direct links between space missions and Earth, but also to free up the Deep Space Network (DSN) of antennas for more important tasks than routine communications.

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